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On Being Gifted in a Way That Isn’t Fast

I have spent most of my life feeling both aligned with and strangely out of phase with the standard definitions of intelligence. I have the test scores—high IQ, strong abstract reasoning, the usual statistical markers—but they have never felt like the right description of what is actually happening inside my mind. When I read Claus Volko’s article, “What is the real difference between average and gifted individuals?,” I felt an immediate recognition with the author’s claim about giftedness, that is, it being qualitatively different and generally and rather strangely, quantitatively higher. It was as if someone had finally articulated the quiet discrepancy I had lived with for decades. My processing speed has always been slower than average. I do not excel at rapid-fire tasks, timed drills, or anything that rewards instantaneous recall. My rote memory is serviceable but not impressive. In school, this often made me look less capable than I was. I could understand the underlying str...
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What is the real difference between average and gifted individuals?

First of all, I'm not sure whether intelligence tests like the one used by Mensa can truly diagnose giftedness, because, in my opinion, these tests are too easy and rely more on processing speed. Psychologists define giftedness as an intelligence level at least two standard deviations above the average. In my opinion, that is not correct; true giftedness is found in a significantly smaller percentage of the population. The difference between people of average ability and those who are gifted in this sense lies primarily in the fact that people of average ability have to learn many things that are crystal clear to the gifted. For example, people of average ability have to learn various problem-solving algorithms in school in order to tackle certain types of math problems. The gifted do not have to do this because they arrive at the solution through reasoning. In school, and in most fields of study as well, a good memory is more important than intelligence.  Claus D. Volko 
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Preliminary Notes on Cognitive Dynamics and Neural Efficiency

When people talk about intelligence, they often imagine it as a fixed trait—something like height or eye color. Traditional IQ scores reinforce this idea by presenting intelligence as a single number that supposedly captures a person’s mental ability. But real thinking doesn’t work that way. It’s not static, and it’s not uniform. It changes depending on the situation, the task, the time available, and even how tired or distracted someone is. The cognitive dynamics model starts from a simple observation: thinking is a kind of activity. It takes time, it requires energy, and it happens under conditions that can either help or hinder it. Instead of treating intelligence as a fixed quantity, this model treats it as a process—something that unfolds over time, shaped by the conditions under which a person is working.  Imagine navigating a landscape. Some terrain is smooth and easy; some is steep or rocky. The distance you cover depends not only on how fast you can move but also on how mu...
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Perspectives for Geniuses

Many publications about gifted people focus on children. On the one hand, child prodigies pose a well-studied subject of research; on the other, there are also reports about underachievers who don't do well at school despite their intellect. But what has been neglected so far is the lives of gifted adults. What do gifted children do when they reach the official age of maturity? In what professions do they work? How do they earn their livings? My subjective view: Gifted people, especially those with a genius-level IQ (140 or higher), are definitely a fringe group. They are heterogenous but have some characteristics in common, such as being quick on the uptake and being able to think logically. I used to believe that academia would be the domain of geniuses. As a matter of fact, some notable child prodigies such as Norbert Wiener and Terence Tao became university professors. But these are exceptions: In reality, as Michael Wells Ferguson wrote in his legendary essay "The Inappro...
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A Look Back at 42 Years and 10 Months

I was born in Vienna on October 8, 1983. I am very fortunate to have been born highly gifted. That has made my life much easier. Although I didn't get tested until I was an adult, even before I started school, the adults in my life said I was "very clever", which amounts to the same thing. I never had any serious problems in elementary or high school, partly because - unlike in medical school - it wasn't yet necessary to memorize large amounts of factual knowledge in detail. So I grew up believing that I was "clever". When I was five years old, my mother told me about Einstein, who was so clever that he was awarded the Nobel Prize. So I thought to myself: One day, I, too, will win the Nobel Prize. In fact, when I was young, I waited until I was finally allowed to go to university. I planned to study very thoroughly and achieve something that would at least be worthy of a Nobel Prize. I hadn't settled on a specific field, but since my parents favored medi...
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The History of Genetics

In the 19th century, Miescher discovered nucleic acids. In the 1940s, it was demonstrated that nucleic acids, and not proteins, as had previously been believed, are the carriers of genetic information (Avery). A decade later, Watson and Crick elucidated the structure of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA). This was followed by the first attempts to clone and manipulate genes. In 2001, when I began my medical studies, the Human Genome Project was underway. The goal of the project was to sequence the entire human genome. While government agencies used a relatively slow method to do so, Venter was able to make much faster progress using the shotgun sequencing technique. Subsequently, sequencing techniques have improved dramatically, and with CRISPR/Cas9 (Doudna and Charpentier), it has now become somewhat easier and more cost-effective to modify genetic material. In 2000, a year before I graduated from high school, I read Ridley's book "Genome: The Autobiography of a Species". Readi...
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IQ and Intellectual Achievements

A conversation with ChatGPT. Great scientists and philosophers like Einstein or Kant are often attributed very high IQ scores by the media. Do you think that this is justified? Have these intellectuals made their achievements primarily because of their high IQ or because of other talents? For instance, I'm not sure if you really need an exceptionally high IQ to be an original thinker.  I think your intuition is largely correct. The very high IQ scores retrospectively assigned to Einstein, Kant, Newton, Goethe, etc. are usually much less scientifically meaningful than they appear. And even if we knew that someone had an IQ of 160+, it would not by itself explain why that person became an Einstein or Kant. 1. The famous IQ numbers are mostly speculative Einstein never took a modern IQ test, as far as we know. Consequently, claims such as “Einstein had an IQ of 160” are essentially retroactive estimates . The same applies to Kant, Newton, Leonardo da Vinci and many other historica...
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